While every marketer knows that email is still a powerful core communication channel, the fact is that today’s consumer is dealing with email inboxes that are overflowing with …

While every marketer knows that email is still a powerful core communication channel, the fact is that today’s consumer is dealing with email inboxes that are overflowing with superfluous messages. According to HubSpot and Litmus, the best way to circumvent this problem is to keep email marketing messages as concise as possible.

In a recent report entitled “Science of Email 2014,” both companies got together and compared the preferences of 1000 email users to find out how they interacted with their email.

The findings were interesting to say the least. For example, while most users reported that they had a preference for emails that were image-based, the more images an email contained the lower the CTR happened to be.

Not surprisingly, the report also revealed that, when it comes to “self-reported data” like surveys, marketers still face some challenges.

The report states that “When taking surveys, users often answer in ways that reflect either what they think the data collector wants to hear or in ways that reflect what they want to think about themselves.” It goes on to state that “An email with mostly images sounds more interesting than an email with mostly text when spoken about in hypothetical terms, but the reality of them is somewhat different.”

Getting back to the main point of the survey however, it found that the best CTR came from emails that were short and quickly got to the point of what their purpose was. It also found that when the words “download”, “free” and “tomorrow” were used in the subject line, CTR increased.

Those marketers saying to themselves “who cares, I don’t use email anyway”, keep this in mind; Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census 2014 states that nearly 70% of companies report email outperforming all other forms of marketing they were using. 22% of these companies rated email marketing as “excellent”.

Online display advertising? That came in at the bottom with just 5% of companies ranking it “excellent” in terms of ROI.

Email might seem like “old-school” marketing to some, but it still brings results that many other marketing channels simply can’t match. Just make sure to keep it short, sweet and to the point.